Razer Phone specs: Top-end everything

What’s inside the Razer Phone? A whole lot of top-end smartphone hardware.

The Razer Phone is official, marking the first entry into the smartphone world for the gaming-focused brand. There’s a lot to get stuck into, and you’ll want to check out our full hands-on preview for all the details on Razer’s latest creation. But if you just want the all-important numbers, then look no further than the chart below.

Behold — your official Razer Phone spec sheet.

Razer Phone hands-on preview: The gamer phone

Razer brings us the Nextbit Robin’s supercharged, supersized gamer-focused successor.

So Razer made an Android phone.

And not just PC maker Razer — the brand best-known for premium gaming laptops and peripherals — but also the smartphone design talent it acquired when it gobbled up Nextbit last year. Among the big names behind this phone: former HTC design lead Scott Croyle, the man responsible for the HTC One M7 and M8, and of course the Nextbit Robin. Croyle has since departed Razer to start his own design consultancy, but the team he built remains in place.

And the fruit of their labors goes public today: Meet the Razer Phone.

Meet the badass, murdered-out aluminum cousin of the Nextbit Robin.

Even at first glance, the phone’s design heritage is plain to see. This device is essentially the badass, murdered-out aluminum cousin of the Nextbit Robin. The Razer Phone, like the Robin, isn’t particularly chasing svelte proportions or super-slim bezels. In keeping with Razer’s target audience, the phone’s design conveys power, but without the gaudiness that’s seen in some gaming brands.

Though sophisticated, the Razer Phone is also kind of a tank. The 5.7-inch display is flanked by dual stereo speakers and contained in a great big, unapologetic black metal chassis. The Nextbit DNA is evident here too — again, in the speakers, but also in the proportions and how angular this phone is, as well as the placement of the fingerprint scanner on the side. Despite the overall bulk of the device, there’s a pleasing symmetry to the Razer phone’s hardware.

The pitch-black aluminium — decorated around the back with a sizeable Razer logo — gives it an imposing yet modern look. Like many of Razer’s laptops, it means business, but it’s not too over-the-top. (For an unfortunate example of the opposite, see Acer’s ill-fated Predator tablet.)

Being a phone for gamers, high-end specs are a key focus: The Razer Phone is powered by a Snapdragon 835 processor, with 8GB of RAM and 64GB of storage plus microSD expansion and a 4,000mAh battery. That enormous battery capacity matches the Huawei Mate 10 — in fact, I’m not aware of any high-end phone that has this much juice to offer. Razer’s also shipping the phone with QuickCharge 4+ for extra-quick refills — the first product to be announced with the latest Qualcomm charging standard.

The two front-facing speakers are fantastic — ludicrously loud, and worthy of their prominent placement. And you’d hope so, since the Razer phone is the latest Android flagship to forego the 3.5mm headphone jack. The dongle is at least THX-certified. But it’s still a dongle, which is basically a bad thing. It’s hard to imagine space being constrained in such a large phone.

Razer is betting on a fancy new 120Hz display to push gamers to its new handset.

The display is an impressive 5.7-inch Sharp panel at Quad HD resolution, but what’s really unique about it is that it’s a 120Hz panel, and that faster refresh rate — as you may have heard from iPhone X reviews — makes everything extra-smooth. Razer has developed a dynamic refresh rate technology that intelligently adjusts it down to the level required by whichever app you’re using in order to save battery power. For static images and less demanding apps, it’ll go lower. In games, or when scrolling through apps or feeds, it can crank all the way up to 120Hz.

Extra frames make everything look smoother and more pleasing, but obviously gaming is where this feature is expected to set the Razer Phone aside. Many games will just work at the new, higher refresh rate. But Razer says it’s working with major developers to uncap frame rates and let their phone run in all its 120Hz glory. We demoed just a couple of titles on the Razer Phone during our brief time with it, and we’ll take a deeper dive in our full review.

To help it push all those frames, Razer claims best-in-class thermals, using heatpipe technology adapted from its Blade series gaming laptops. Hopefully that’ll improve performance endurance over time, which has generally been a weak point for phones — particularly Android phones — in graphically intensive titles.

The software’s based on Android 7.1.1 Nougat, not the new Oreo, which is a little disappointing. Although Razer promises an update to 8.0 in the first quarter of 2018, you’re shipping on old firmware, and that’s not a great look for an enthusiast product. At least the company’s offering a clean, near-stock build of the OS — with the exception of a few green accents here and there, naturally.

What’s more, the stock launcher for the Razer Phone is… Nova Launcher — a specialized build of the fan-favorite home screen app, with Google Feed integration and support for the phone’s high refresh rate. Out of the box, it looks pretty much like a stock Android launcher, which is fine if you weren’t hoping for anything more dazzling or space-age, as we’ve seen from Samsung and Google in their latest home screen layouts.

The cameras lack OIS, but first impressions are solid.

The jury is mostly out on camera performance right now. We’ve only had a very short amount of time playing with the Razer Phone’s dual cameras, mainly indoors. Either way, you get two 12-megapixel cameras, one standard, one telephoto, behind f/1.75 and f/2.4 lenses respectively. There’s no OIS (optical image stabilization), which seems like an oversight for a current high-end phone — so we’ll have to see how well the phone handles low-light photos in our full review. Either way, the (very) small handful of indoor samples we shot turned out pretty well.

The Razer Phone seems to get a lot right. I’m a fan of the design, despite its going against the grain of the broader high-end space. Razer hits a lot of the right cues for its target audience, with ridiculous specs, a key differentiator in the form of 120Hz support, and an enthusiast-friendly software experience.

But we’ll have to give it the full review treatment before we know whether this phone’s unique display and powerful hardware can make up for missing features like OIS, a headphone jack and water resistance. These three seem like odd omissions for a phone aimed at gamers and early adopters, as does the lack of Daydream VR support, considering the phone’s high refresh rate. (It’s likely there are some LCD-related technical hurdles still left to be overcome there.)

The Razer phone will ship later this year for $699 in the U.S., and in countries like the UK, where it’s sold on carriers, Three will be the exclusive partner.

Razer has a dedicated following in the gaming space, and a solid first effort in the form of the Razer phone. Can it transform this into a foothold in the highly competitive high-end smartphone market? The brand certainly has a chance, but I’d be more confident if it could boast more up-to-date software, a stronger camera setup, and key features like water resistance.

Thinking about picking up a Razer phone? Give us your first impressions down in the comments!

The Nook GlowLight 3 is better suited for night-time reading

The battle of competing e-readers has all been won by Amazon’s Kindle line of products, but there still manage to be a few sorties here and there from the sidelines. Kobo just announced a more capacious Aura reader, and now Barnes and Noble is actually trying one more time with a new version of its e-ink Nook reader, the $120 GlowLight 3, available for pre-order now and for purchase in stores on November 8th.

The company touts the advanced lighting system for its new Nook. The GlowLight 3 will automatically and gradually switch its front light from a daytime cool white light to a warmer, orange-toned glow for nighttime reading. The case will have a new “soft touch finish” aimed at keeping your hands comfy while holding the Nook for long periods, and there will be page turning buttons on both sides of the Nook to give both lefties and righties an easy one-handed reading experience.

The company says that the e-ink display is its highest resolution, yet with crisp text and no flashing when turning pages. GlowLight 3 has twice as much onboard storage as the previous GlowLight Plus model, and you can begin to fill it up with a free issue of The New Yorker, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal or USA Today when you purchase a GlowLight 3. If e-ink doesn’t interest you, Barnes and Noble still offers plenty of other full-color Nooks for their stalwart customers, including Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 2, Tab A Nook and Tab E Nook, along with the Nook Tablet 7-inch.

Source: Barnes and Noble

The real villain in ‘Wolfenstein II’ is a complicit America 

Wolfenstein: The New Colossus improves on everything you liked in the franchise’s soft reboot, 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order. The action, set pieces, characters and writing are all sharper this time around. So is the thoughtful terror in the alternate universe’s setting. After striking a blow in Europe against the global Nazi regime in the first game, The New Colossus brings protagonist BJ Blazkowicz and his anti-Nazi crew back to the US — where they find many Americans have gleefully accepted Nazi rule.

The nominal antagonist, the maniacal Frau Engel, returns from the first game to hound and torture BJ and the resistance, reaching new heights in brutality that’ll inspire some serious Nazi-killing vengeance in players. But it’s a Reich-compliant America that looms larger as a haunting vision of what-if horror. In one sequence, BJ tours a sparkling American town strewn with happy citizens cheering a parade of Nazis. Players walk past a pair of hooded KKK acolytes sucking up to Nazi soldier, but they can also stroll around to watch an American woman flirt with an officer by praising Nazi bigotry. The deeply twisted Nazi doctrine has saturated — and been embraced by — the people in town, from the aunt who tells her niece she’ll have slaves up for auction, to cinemagoers who say they’re glad for the pro-Nazi movies playing instead of the Hollywood ‘filth.’

Which all seems timely in the wake of Nazis marching in America’s real-world streets, but the timing was coincidental: “The game and its content were well along the path to completion, and no one from MachineGames or Bethesda could have predicted Nazis marching down American streets in 2017. Even talking about it now seems ludicrous,” Bethesda Softworks’ VP of Marketing Pete Hines told Glixel. Of course, Bethesda leaned into the unfortunate resurrection of Nazis on American streets with an anti-Nazi marketing campaign leading up to The New Colossus’ release, and MachineGames even slipped in a few suspiciously timely easter eggs into the game, but the game’s plot was finalized years ago. Nevertheless, players have criticized Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, the game in a 25-year-old franchise about Nazi killing, for cashing in on topical events and brought down the game’s Metacritic score.

Nazi soldiers are cartoonish antagonists from a bygone era that the free world defeated seventy years ago. But an America complying with — and embracing — life under Nazism is hits a little too close to home.

This isn’t just a reference how much the Nazi party and Hitler himself were inspired by the American eugenics movement. Or that Nazism took root in America thereafter, culminating in a 25,000-strong crowd at a Nazi rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Or that revivalist Nazis walk arm-in-arm with white supremacist groups today, in 2017. Instead the America of The New Colossus is an extreme (and hopefully absurd) example of what Americans might sacrifice to protect their positions — namely, each other.

Like its predecessor, The New Colossus tucks world lore into letters and postcards strewn throughout the game. In one, the Nazis seem just as baffled that many Americans have about-faced to embrace the regime. Sometimes the Americans dress up their complicity as pragmatism, like the mother who teaches her young child German because he’ll ‘need it in the future.’ But others, like the Klansmen, enjoy the Nazi overlordship because it sanctions their bigotry and feelings of supremacy. Some will sell out their country for safety, and others to secure a position of superiority, oblivious to the irony of living under an occupying force.

Today, there are Americans openly marching in streets under Nazi flags. The loose coalition of like-minded white supremacists groups might be plagued with infighting, but The New Colossus argues that you don’t need powerful traitors to destroy the country. In the game, after America surrendered to the unstoppable Nazi onslaught, resistance was crippled once the already-privileged secured their comfort by consenting to Nazi rule. It doesn’t take fifth columnists to destroy the American way — just people who will sacrifice others to carve out some compromised luxury.

Watch Razer debut its gaming phone right here at 4 PM ET

We’ve been following the potential Razer gaming phone for a while now, with a recent leak potentially confirming some higher-end specifications (more RAM, better battery and display) sure to please mobile gamers. The company is setting up for a livestream today at 4 PM ET that could finally confirm the rumors.

The keynote will stream live on YouTube at 1 PM Pacific time, 8 PM London time November 1st, which translates to 4 AM in Singapore and 7 AM in Sydney. The mysterious description on the YouTube page says, “Tune in for our biggest unveiling of the year. Watch. Listen. Play.” We’re hoping we see the gaming phone that Razer may have acquired Nextbit and its Robin phone for last January. The livestream is embedded below for your convenience.

Source: Razer / YouTube

Smart earbud maker Doppler Labs shuts down

Doppler Labs unveiled its Here earbud line in 2015 with dreams of being at the vanguard of smart audio: you could control how much you heard of the outside world, and there were plans for translation and other voice-guided features. Unfortunately, that vision of the future isn’t coming to pass. Doppler is shutting down after struggling to raise funds for its next project (an “alternative to traditional hearing aids”) and otherwise keep the lights on. Support will keep running until December 1st, and the company will release a rough version of its next-generation Here One iOS app as a going-away present, but there won’t be more than that.

The closure isn’t coming for lack of trying. In an interview with Wired, Doppler chief Noah Kraft has revealed that the company held preliminary acquisition talks with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. When those didn’t pan out, Doppler didn’t have many options. It had sold just 25,000 earbud sets, which clearly wasn’t a sustainable business. The company had pivoted to focus more on hearing health (it even helped pass a law that enabled over-the-counter hearing aid sales), but that didn’t matter when there was no one to fund this change in direction.

And as Kraft explained, the very act of starting a hardware company was Doppler’s mistake. “We shouldn’t have done that, he said. It’s not hard to see why. While the smart headphone market was largely new when Doppler got started, things got very crowded, very quickly. Between Apple’s AirPods, Samsung’s IconX and Google’s Pixel Buds (among others), Doppler was trying to compete with smart earbuds that had much stronger brand recognition and access to resources that a startup just couldn’t match, such as AI assistants like Siri or Bixby. Its consolation prize is that it helped start the trend toward smart, completely wireless audio — the next time you’re talking to your earbuds, you’ll know who to thank.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Here One

Google Assistant for Android now supports Spanish and Italian

Google announced today that its virtual assistant will now support two new languages — Spanish for users in the US, Mexico and Spain as well as Italian for those in Italy. These languages will be rolling out over the next few weeks, according to Google, and while initially they’ll only be available for Android, the company says iPhone support will be released later this year.

With these additions, Google Assistant now supports a total of eight languages — including English, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese and Korean — in 12 countries around the world. While that puts Google’s virtual assistant in line with Microsoft’s Cortana, which also supports eight languages, ahead of Amazon’s Alexa, which only supports German and a few versions of English, and ahead of Samsung’s Bixby, which supports just English and Korean, it’s still well behind Apple’s Siri. Apple’s assistant currently supports 20 languages — quite a few more than any of its counterparts.

In order to use the new Google Assistant languages with your Android phone, just be sure you’re running Android 6.0 or higher. They should be available in the specified regions in the coming weeks.

Source: Google

Tesla is still struggling to mass produce the Model 3

Hundreds of thousands of orders for Tesla’s Model 3 are pending as the company continues to struggle with producing its mass-market electric vehicle. Tesla dropped its third-quarter earnings report today, which showed it only managed to deliver just 222 units of the car. That’s a fraction of the 1,500 it expected to produce in September alone. Tesla’s inability to deliver on schedule is problematic and undermines its credibility, since the company reported in the second quarter that it was on track to meet previously announced targets. This could also hurt Tesla in the long run as other automakers start releasing their own EVs into the market.

According to a third-quarter recap released last month, Tesla had delivered 220 Model 3 vehicles in the quarter up till then, meaning it only shipped two more since. The company cited battery module assembly line constraints in its Gigafactory 1 facility as a primary reason for the delay. Complex module design as well as Tesla’s having to take over parts of the process previously managed by manufacturing systems suppliers contributed to the problems, according to the report.

Moving forward, Tesla expects to produce “5,000 Model 3 vehicles per week by late Q1 2018”, adding that “our production growth rate is like a stepped exponential, so there can be large forward jumps from one week to the next.” The new estimate is half the 10,000 weekly production estimate the company provided in the second quarter this year. Meanwhile, demand for the Model 3 keeps increasing, as “global net reservations… continued to grow significantly in Q3.”

The company’s other, more expensive cars, like the repeatedly delayed Model X and Model S, saw combined deliveries of 25,915 vehicles this quarter. That’s an 18 percent growth from the last quarter and a 4.5 percent increase from the same quarter last year, which is hardly “exponential.” Combined orders for the Model S and X broke records, according to the report, and Tesla opened 18 new store and service locations in Q3, bringing the number of total locations in the world to 318. The company also added 126 new Supercharger stations, and now there are more than 1,000 stations worldwide.

We’ll learn more about Tesla’s performance this quarter on the company’s earnings call at 530pm ET today, so stay tuned.

Source: Tesla

Facebook pledges to sacrifice profits for better security

Facebook is going through a bit of a rough spot, as it attempts to mend its reputation following allegations that it was used by Russians to influence last year’s elections. Still, the company is making money hand over fist, as it reported yet another blockbuster quarter with over $10.3 billion in total revenue. That’s a 47 percent increase from this time last year and about a 10 percent growth from last quarter. Yet, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that profitability would soon take a back seat to better security.

“Our community continues to grow and our business is doing well,” he said. “But none of that matters if our services are used in ways that don’t bring people closer together. We’re serious about preventing abuse on our platforms. We’re investing so much in security that it will impact our profitability,” he continued. “Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits.”

Of the $10.3 billion in revenue, over $10.1 billion came from advertising. And of that total, about 88 percent came from mobile, which is 4 percent more than what was reported last quarter. Facebook’s user numbers continue to grow as well. The social network now has 2.07 billion monthly users and 1.37 billion daily users, which are both 16 percent increase year-over-year.

In the call, Zuckerberg elaborated on his concerns over Russian interference. “I’ve expressed how upset I am that the Russians used our tools to sow mistrust and undermine our values. What they did is wrong and we’re not going to stand for it.” As a result, Facebook has invested aggressively in boosting its security efforts. It’s hired more people to better enforce community standards and it’s also looking to improve its artificial intelligence to be better at spotting security holes. Zuckerberg also said it was working with other tech companies to respond to national security threats.

Developing…

Source: Facebook

Living in space has drastic, negative effects on the brain

Ever since we started seriously thinking about sending humans into space, the question that has immediately followed is, “What will zero-g do to our bodies?” After all, our frames and body functions have evolved to exist within Earth’s gravity, not in the weightlessness of space. And now, thanks to astronauts such as Scott Kelly and Peggy Whitson, we know that long-duration spaceflight takes an incredible toll on the body. But what causes these issues and changes? That’s what one study conducted by neuroradiologist Donna Roberts aimed to find out.

One common side effect of going to space is a degradation of vision. Even on short two-week shuttle flights, some astronauts experienced a degradation of their visual acuity that lasted beyond the duration of the spaceflight. NASA has termed this condition VIIP, or Vision Impairment and Intracranial Pressure, because it’s thought to be a result of “pressure changes in the brain and spinal fluid caused by weightlessness,” according to NASA. However, not every astronaut experiences this condition. Roberts’ research aimed to get to the bottom of what the cause of VIIP actually is.

Roberts conducted an experiment in which participants stayed in bed for 90 days. To simulate the effects of microgravity on the human brain, the participants’ heads were tilted downwards. Roberts then used fMRIs to determine what exactly was happening to their brains. The results were interesting.

First, there was “crowding” at the top of the brain, and it got worse the longer patients were in this position. Second, participants’ brains were shifting, and the space between the top of the brain and the skull decreased. In order to tell whether these effects also occurred in astronauts during spaceflight, Roberts compared her participants’ brain images to those taken following various durations of spaceflight, from a couple of weeks to a few months.

The results of the study, which will be published on November 2nd in the New England Journal of Medicine, show the same narrowing of the central sulcus, which is an area at the top of the brain that separates the frontal and parietal lobes. Ninety-four percent of astronauts that participated in long-duration spaceflights had this condition. Less than 20 percent of astronauts back from short-term spaceflights showed the same narrowing.

The frontal and parietal lobes control executive function and the body, so any affect on these areas of the brain is worrying. And it’s clear that the longer the spaceflight, the worse VIIP gets. One solution to relieve the symptoms of VIIP is to perform a lumbar puncture and remove the spinal fluid causing the pressure buildup. However, while this is a possibility for a similar condition that affects a small subset of women on the Earth, there are currently no procedures for performing such a complex procedure in space. Roberts’ next goal is to understand the effects of increased carbon dioxide intake on astronauts, as well as to continue to follow up on this research by looking at long-term astronaut data.

It’s not difficult to understand why this research is so important. As we move further and further from our planet and begin exploring space, we need to know that we can survive and function during these long trips in zero-g. Astronauts would need to live outside Earth’s gravity for three years on a trip to Mars — three to six months each way, plus two years waiting for the planets to align favorably once again. Mars has some gravity, but it’s approximately 1/3 that of the Earth’s. We need to understand how living in that kind of environment for an extended period of time will affect astronauts, and how they can mitigate any effects on their bodies and neural function.

Source: EurekAlert